Notes and Communications

Educational institutions in the Netherlands have some degree of economic independence. Their management decisions are not guided completely by a budget system, but in part also by a market mechanism. Still, budget management is crucial as survival is not primarily determined by the amount of equity capital, but by the annual funding received from the government. For the evaluation of capital management, a capitalization factor is introduced to measure the amount of capital employed by an educational institute in relation to its annual income. It can signal possible inefficiencies reflected in excessive capital assets. Actual budget and capital management is assessed with the help of four financial indicators. There appears to be scope for improvements in financial policies and some recommendations are offered on how to attain them.     

The Impact of Perceived Ethical Culture of the Firm and Demographic Variables on Auditors’ Ethical Evaluation and Intention to Act Decisions

Studies into corporate social responsibility (CSR) in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have suggested that small businesses are different to the large companies on which CSR research usually focusses. Extending this argument, this article raises the question what differences in approaches to CSR there are within the SME category. Analysing the CSR strategy and performance of a medium-sized fashion retailer in the United Kingdom through manager interviews as well as customer and employee surveys, the article develops an analytical framework of CSR in small, medium and large firms. The argument is developed that medium-sized firms occupy a transition stage, where some CSR features that are reminiscent of small enterprises are still important but get overlaid with aspects that are more typical of large companies.     

为财务报告“瘦身”

如果我们任由公司的财务报告往不断复杂的方向发展,那么这些报告将可能失去其本来的意义--与股东有效的沟通.这种风险的存在,促使英国财务报告委员会决定对公司的报告体系进行一次调查,目的是使公司报告的编制者和相关使用者能够了解报告的复杂程度,并提出可行性意见,以便找到切实可行的办法来简化它们.     

Social services: More care for less money

Local authority social service departments are not the only providers of care. In most communities, private and voluntary organisations provide alternatives, which usually remain firmly outside the public sector. Wiltshire, with some backing from central government, has sought to make the most effective use of those alternatives, both in terms of care and cost.     

The Effects of Outside Directors and Board Shareholdings on the Relation Between Chief Executive Compensation and Firm Performance

Critics of corporate governance have suggested that improvements in board monitoring will arise from more independent boards consisting of outside directors and from increased stock ownership by directors. Presumably these changes should result in more rational, more defensible compensation decisions in which pay is clearly tied to results. In this paper, we test the premise that boards with a relatively higher proportion of outsiders and boards with significant shareholdings maintain a closer link between corporate performance and executive pay than do boards with fewer outsiders and boards holding little stock. The results of the study, based on a sample of 268 large corporations, are mixed. As expected, boards with significant shareholdings maintain a stronger linkage between compensation and firm-level performance. This finding persists even after controls are included for CEO and outsider shareholdings. Contrary to expectations, however, evidence was not found that firms with a higher proportion of outsiders on the board of directors relate compensation more strongly to firm results.     

The 2008 short sale ban: Liquidity, dispersion of opinion, and the cross-section of returns of US financial stocks

This study examines the cross-sectional impact of the 2008 short sale ban on the returns of US financial stocks. Motivated by the large cross-sectional variation in the extent to which banned stocks suffer an illiquidity shock, we hypothesize that stocks with larger liquidity declines are associated with poorer contemporaneous stock returns. The evidence supports this hypothesis and suggests that this effect is stronger for more liquid stocks, as predicted by Amihud and Mendelson (1986). Moreover, consistent with Miller’s (1977) model, we report a valuation reversal whereby stocks with higher abnormal returns at the onset of the ban have lower abnormal returns at its removal. Our findings are robust when we control for firms most affected by TARP, include non-banned matched firms, and compare banned firms’ stock returns with their bond returns. From a policy standpoint, the ban reduced valuations, ceteris paribus, of the stocks that were hardest hit by illiquidity.     

Macroeconomic uncertainty and performance in the European Union

We use a very general bivariate GARCH-M model and monthly data on EU countries covering the 1962–2003 period to test for the impact of real (output growth) and nominal (inflation) macroeconomic uncertainty on inflation and output growth. Our evidence supports a number of important conclusions. First, in the majority of countries uncertainty regarding the output growth rate is related to the average growth rate and the effect in several countries is negative. Second, in half of the cases there is no significant relationship between inflation uncertainty and output growth performance. Third, inflation and output uncertainty have a mixed effect on inflation. Nevertheless, considerable evidence for the Cukierman–Meltzer hypothesis is obtained. Our conclusions are based on adopting both a structural and a reduced-form bivariate GARCH model. Finally, we also find statistically significant evidence of regime switching for both inflation and output growth volatility throughout the sample.